"I
had this vision, you see, that the use of learning objects
would, in effect, make learning content seamlessly and
effortlessly available not only to all students, but to all
people in the world who wished to learn, and that the
portability and reusability of learning objects meant that
we could develop an educational environment where students
were not marched in lockstep through a predefined
curriculum but instead could have the freedom and capacity
to explore the world of learning according to their own
interests and their own whims. Learning, genuinely free and
accessible learning, could be produced and shared by
all.

"So what went wrong? I mean, it’s easy to say
that the systems are too expensive, the learning too
boring, the search too cumbersome, the reusable objects too
not reusable. What matters here is that I be able to
explain why the existing model is inadequate, and how it
differs from the model that is worth emulating, the one
that I have suggested, and now say explicitly, is the model
instantiated by the World Wide Web itself.

"Order
emerges out of networks because networks are not static and
organized but instead are dynamic and growing. A network
consists of a set of entities – called, variously, units or
neurons, but which can be in fact anything from crickets to
blog posts to bloggers. In a network, these entities
operate autonomously and are only tenuously connected – as
the slogan goes, small pieces loosely joined. They receive
input from other entities to which they are connected,
organize that input, and then pass it on – or as the slogan
goes, ‘aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward’." By
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, October 9, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]